Mitch Daniels Is Not The Answer, Either

Long, long ago, before the rise and fall of Willard Romney, and the ascent to the position of Next Big Thing by (first) "Bobby" Jindal and now young Senator Tupac from Florida, there was Mitch Daniels. He was the Republican man with the plan, a guy who would "streamline" government in a "bipartisan" way and would be the (figuratively) giant personality who would be able to get the Republicans to leave all those "divisive social issues" behind and run again as the wise stewards of our economy.

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(Ed. Note: Those "divisive social issues" are back with a vengeance in the states, while the latest kabuki reform among the Republicans is on immigration reform. And, anyway, one of the first things Daniels did as governor was to defund Planned Parenthood in his state.)

(Ed. Note Also, Too: Accepting Daniels as a budgetary whiz required you to drink enough Sterno to forget that he had been the Budget Director for George W. Bush, which was like running the soda fountain at Jonestown. We continue.)

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He had all of them fooled. I think he and David Brooks were picking out silver patterns, and even Ezra Klein seemed intrigued, if only because the Republicans seemed disinclined to follow Daniels's sensible, moderate Republican advice. Well, Daniels is gone now, having arranged a parachute and a soft-landing spot as president of Purdue University. And, is the wont of anyone who worked for the Avignon Presidency, he left his successor, Mike Pence, a man who has to be fastened to the floor in order to stay off the ceiling, a boatload of problems as it becomes increasingly obvious that Mitch Daniels's sensible, moderate Republican ideas were pretty much the same friend-enriching, privatization schemes beloved by all Republican politicians who play down the Jeebus in favor of rejiggering the system toward oligarchy.

Others weighed in after The Star exposed numerous emails and internal documents that showed utility executives had a chummy relationship with some state regulators.

Those revelations cost four high-ranking people their jobs, including David Lott Hardy, former chairman of the regulatory commission, who was fired by Gov. Mitch Daniels in late 2010. Others who lost their jobs were Duke's No. 2 executive, the company's former Indiana president and a Duke lawyer named Scott Storms. The ethics scandal began, in large part, when Storms joined Duke in 2010 from the IURC, where he had been working as a chief administrative law judge. In that role, he oversaw the IURC's regulation of the Edwardsport project while negotiating for a job with utility.

Yes, but this will all work out fine because private enterprise is vastly more honest and efficient than government work, and businesses will self-regulate or else pay a penalty in The Marketplace. Mitch Daniels's star has sunk below the horizon nationally, but there's always going to be another one on the rise, and people will be dazzled enough not to notice that the problem is not the person, it's the fact that the ideas are bad, and that they don't work, except for the various individuals connected enough to make a buck. It's not American politics that's crooked. It's American business. Politicians are pikers by comparison.